Samuel L. Jackson. You know him. You love him. What more introduction or explanation does he require? In honor of Jackson’s 75th birthday this month, Midwest Film Journal staffers and contributors present a monthlong celebration titled Hold On To Your Butts.
An awful lot of Samuel L. Jackson’s most memorable performances are striking because of his ability to fill the space around his character. Jackson is an imposing figure with a big personality and a booming voice, and he frequently leverages those attributes to make his characters larger than life. This does not mean he is a ham or that he upstages his fellow actors. Jackson plays big, bold and loud — blending shouted curse words and intense stares like a painter mixing colors on the palette. Such expansive performances are the meme-worthy ones and the quotable ones, but they’re hardly the limit of Jackson’s abilities, and his performance as Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight proves that conclusively.
The Hateful Eight simply doesn’t give Jackson any physical space for all of those attributes, and his performance is all the better for it. Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 film is a chamber piece through and through, first in the close confines of a stagecoach and then within the storm-battered walls of Minnie’s Haberdashery. More to the point, Major Warren might be the film’s protagonist, but he must keep his orbit small to make room for the other characters.
After all, the scenes in the cabin that is Minnie’s require room for Kurt Russell’s brilliant turn as buffoonish bounty hunter John Ruth and his verbal sparring with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s shrieking harpy, Daisy Domergue. What space is left after that is amply filled by Walton Goggins and his strutting, arrogant Confederate-soldier-turned-sheriff Chris Mannix.
Within the world of the film, Warren is unimportant to the others because of his race. That’s a key theme here, and it’s underlined by the way Jackson stands aside in most scenes, letting the others have the spotlight. Major Warren sits back in the wings, watching, learning and calculating without saying much. Even his movements are small and deliberate, especially compared to Russell, who thrashes around the set like a caged bear eager to escape.
Jackson’s character is both so well-written and well-played that a person could be forgiven for not realizing he is the hero of this story. While he has the most screen time, he frequently seems like an accessory to someone else’s arc, such as a foil for Mannix or a sidekick to Ruth. It’s not until fairly late in the film when Jackson fully takes the reins with a pair of epic monologues.
The second of these is a classic detective story trope. After Ruth and another guest are murdered by poisoned coffee, Warren calmly and definitively breaks down the evidence to reveal the culprits while holding the entire group at gunpoint. (Of course, this is a Tarantino film. Instead of the police riding in just in time to hear their confessions and drag the murderers to justice, some previously unrevealed character shoots Warren in the crotch and sets off a brutally violent final act.) Still, Warren’s cool dissection of the evidence and confident reveal is fantastic, especially because the other actors do a tremendous job of showing the dawning realization that they have underestimated this man. Warren keeps his cool, even sitting down to reload his six-shooter mid-conversation, and instantly establishes that he’s been the smartest one in the room the whole time. Goggins is also brilliant here, playing Mannix as the only one who hasn’t realized how far ahead of the game Warren is —confidently and repeatedly interrupting with incorrect theories. It’s a wonderful scene, and Jackson’s performance would be award-worthy on the strength of this superficial mystery story alone.
And yet there’s so much more to unpack here, and it’s Jackson’s first monologue that elevates The Hateful Eight to another level. There’s another layer at work, a thematic undercurrent that Jackson suddenly seizes from its background and holds up to the light — the way the film reckons with American racism in stark and unforgiving terms.
The elements are all there from the beginning: Ruth’s fixation on Warren’s perceived value because of a supposed correspondence with President Abraham Lincoln; Mannix’s dismissal of Warren’s wartime heroics as worthless because no one could think his one Black life was worth all the white soldiers he killed to escape; Daisy’s blatant hatred; General Smithers (a delightfully loathsome Bruce Dern) refusal to even address him directly; Joe Gage (Michael Madsen doing his mumbling, menacing Michael Madsen thing) disregarding him so completely that Warren easily gets the drop on him during a confrontation with Ruth. No one sees him for who he is. No one gives him a second thought.
When Warren lays a loaded gun at Smithers’ elbow and proceeds to spend the next several minutes provoking him to reach for it so he can gun the old general down in his chair, even the audience may find itself seeing Major Warren for the first time. And what they see is a man enraged, seething with a barely contained fury that only barely bubbles over before he gets it back under control. Warren is beyond angry — angry at the mad fucking injustice of a world where Smithers could murder Union prisoners in cold blood and get away with it simply because of the color of their skin — but Jackson does not get big and loud. He goes cold and quiet, only the flash of intensity in his eyes and the maniacal grin on his face giving away the boiling, surging wrath beneath the surface.
We never know if the story Warren lays out in this monologue is true or not, if he actually forced Smithers’ son to sexually humiliate himself while begging a Black man for his life, but Warren certainly knows even the possibility is more than Smithers can bear. When Warren finally breaks him and Smithers grabs for the gun, Warren calmly draws, shoots him dead and goes back to his drink. His plan has worked to perfection, but Warren doesn’t seem to take any joy in it. After all, this is barely justice. How can there be satisfaction in it?
The Hateful Eight deals more directly with questions about race than any other Tarantino film, even Django Unchained. They share a similar rage, but The Hateful Eight doesn’t give in to the admittedly satisfying fantasy of revenge on the racists. Even in the end, when Daisy is bargaining with Mannix to shoot Warren and set her free, Mannix still doesn’t see Warren as an equal person. Mannix’s decision is guided not by a moral compass or because Warren has convinced him he’s worthy. In the end, Mannix simply hates Daisy more because she almost let him drink the poisoned coffee. You can see the fear in Warren’s eyes when he realizes he’s out of bullets and the man he must trust with his life has told him to his face that he doesn’t consider it a life worth saving. It’s a brutal moment, and Jackson gives it so much life without needing to take over the screen.
There is certainly room to argue about what role Tarantino should play in confronting racism on screen as a white man with a tendency to overuse a particular racial slur in his writing, but that is a different conversation. This one is simply to applaud Samuel L. Jackson for taking that commentary from the page and making it into something real and palpable on the screen. Whoever wrote the words, Jackson is the one who delivers them with a knockout punch, channeling that careful control as an actor into a character who is barely in control of his rage — beautifully done and worth taking the time to appreciate.